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Does Black Dog’s bankruptcy spell the end to Canadian art book publishing?

When Black Dog Publishing, a refined London-based maker of art and architecture books, declared bankruptcy earlier this year, it was felt nowhere more acutely than right here in Canada, an ocean away. Over the past decade, art organizations large and small had come to see Black Dog as something of a silver bullet for all their publishing woes: With its low costs, international distribution and appetite for its sometimes-rarefied content, it seemed to good to be true — and as it turns out, it was.

But does Black Dog’s demise mean the end of art publishing here? Not at all. “It was amazing how Black Dog was embraced almost as a single solution,” said Jim Shedden, the publishing manager at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which hired the company to do three books, including one on iconic local artist Suzy Lake.

Canadian artist Kent Monkman’s book based on his Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience exhibition is now pending thanks to the Black Dog’s bankruptcy. (Marcus Oleniuk / Toronto Star)

Luis Jacob’s book based on Form Follows Fiction, his landmark exhibition of Toronto artists at the University of Toronto’s Art Museum in 2016 has been put on hold after Black Dog declared bankruptcy. (Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star)

“They were sophisticated about contemporary art, and that meant a lot to the people they were working with. But really, they weren’t here that long. And maybe there won’t be another one of those, but there are certainly things to be done.”

Shedden, who has stewarded dozens of books from conception to publication, says the reality of art book publishing in Canada is rarely rosy, but it’s not hopeless. “Books are always in crisis,” he says. “That means when new opportunities come on board, it can be hard to see how exciting they are when your old situation is crumbling.”

Shedden notes the Art Canada Institute, a non-profit organization that has been publishing career monographs of significant Canadian artists in digital form, as an innovative step in a notoriously tight market (after a few years of publishing online only, the ACI is now looking at making physical editions).

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Goose Lane in New Brunswick and Figure 1 in Vancouver are a pair of publishers working their way through a changing model, Shedden says. While they may not offer the kind of foreign distribution Black Dog did, their editions are top quality. And Figure 1 recently signed a distribution deal with Prestel, a European distributor.

Meanwhile, Black Dog’s demise has left several notable projects in limbo. Kent Monkman’s exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, the Indigenous artist’s career-making turn, will move to its fourth venue without its accompanying book, now trapped in Black Dog’s post-bankruptcy liquidation (a London-based company, St. James Media, has acquired its assets, but hasn’t said what it will do with pending projects). Another, a co-production of Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery and the Power Plant in Toronto on the artist Julia Dault is also stalled.

Since Black Dog’s initial splash, the Canadian publishing scene has changed considerably, says MaryAnn Camilleri, founder of the Magenta Foundation. Camilleri will produce a dozen art books this year alone, including a recently-published edition on the Canadian painter Kim Dorland and another on the Landmarks series of installations in Canadian national parks for last year’s sesquicentennial.

“It’s really important for artists to have books. They give an exhibition an eternal life,” she said. “But there are so many different ways to do it. I truly think there’s just a complete lack of education of how to publish in Canada and what that means.”

After some initial broad successes — Phantom Shanghai, a book by Canadian photographer Greg Girard, sold through three editions of more than 3,000 copies, unheard of for a Canadian art book — Camilleri right-sized her publishing operation to a sustainable scale.

“Everyone seems to think you need to (spend) $50,000 (to produce a book), and that’s just not true,” she says. “There are printers right here in Canada that can do a great job at a very good price.”

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Pricing was certainly part of Black Dog’s initial appeal. David Liss, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Canada, remembers receiving a letter from Black Dog in 2010, when the museum was preparing a solo exhibition of Jacob’s work called Pictures at an Exhibition. “I jumped on it,” Liss recalls. “You get a lot of solicitations, but this was too good to be true.” On top of remarkably reasonable production costs — the publisher promised 500 copies at $20,000, “far less than anything we could have done on our own, at the time,” Liss, recalled — Black Dog also offered the brass ring of Canadian art book publishing: Foreign distribution in the U.S. as well as Europe.

Depending on the scale of the project and the size of the organization, catalogues can either be fully designed and edited in-house and handed off to the publisher for printing and distribution, or, in the case of smaller organizations without those resources, a publisher can offer to take care of the whole package. In the case of Jacob’s first book, Liss said, “we gave them $20,000 and they said, ‘We’ll take it from here.’”

After Pictures at an Exhibition, Black Dog had no shortage of willing collaborators. Over less than a decade, Black Dog published at least two dozen books on Canadian art and artists, providing a remedy for what’s been seen, largely, as an historic challenge for Canadian art institutions at all levels. “Book publishing is expensive, and distribution is always an issue,” said Liss. “There’s a lot of prestige and legitimacy around books in the art world. If you want to take an artist to Europe or Asia, institutions there want to see a serious publication. It’s validating.”

Black Dog stepped in to satisfy intense pent-up demand, prompting many to leap before looking too closely. “Once they started really going hard at publishing Canadian art books, I had to think: What’s the business model here? Here’s a publisher in London with a sudden and ambitious interest in publishing Canadian art books. Unfortunately, that’s already cause for suspicion.”

So what now? “The reality is, I’m excited,” said Camilleri. “Something bad happened — I get it. But there’s no way people didn’t know something wasn’t right. But the reality is, there are a lot of ways to publish here. We made a mistake, but let’s move forward and do this the right way.”

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